Nokia 2: Is the Tepid Media Response Justified?

The entry-level Nokia 2 was recently announced without any of the fanfare you’d normally associate with important smartphone launches, even though the device should be fairly important to the fortunes of the brand in India. One would have expected the media to be enthusiastic about a mainstream Nokia launch but the response so far has been tepid at best. Sure, the Finnish telecom giant really doesn’t have a lot to do with Nokia smartphones anymore, seeing as they are manufactured by Foxconn and developed by HMD Global under license, but what’s really disappointed most Android enthusiasts is the terribly underwhelming hardware on offer.

The Nokia 2 features a 5″ LTPS HD display protected by Gorilla Glass 3. It’s powered by the Snapdragon 212 SoC that comes with an integrated quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU clocked at 1.3GHz and an Adreno 304 GPU clocked at 409MHz. It also comes with just the 1GB of RAM and a meager 8GB of internal storage, making it extremely anemic when compared to its rivals in the same price-bracket. As for the cameras, there’s an 8MP sensor on the back and a 5MP unit on the front, both of which are capable of shooting 1080p videos at 30fps. If all of that fails to impress you, maybe the battery and software would help enliven your mood. The device comes with a sizeable 4,100mAh battery and ships with built-in Android Nougat with a promised update to Oreo next year.

While HMD Global, the company behind Nokia-branded Android smartphones, is yet to announce its India-specific pricing for the Nokia 2, the device will be priced at €99 (around Rs. 7,500) in Europe, which means in India, it will be competing against heavyweights like the Xiaomi Redmi 4A, Moto C Plus and the recently-launched Redmi Y1, all of which are priced in the same general ballpark and offer much, much better hardware. Only time will tell if the Nokia 2 will be able to hold its own against these powerful devices with its sub-entry-level hardware, but you can see why the media and online commentators are being almost dismissive of the new Nokia 2 that many believe is massively overpriced for what it is offering.